


if you ever come back

by fracturedvaels



Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Gen, Introspection, templar!Carver
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-18
Updated: 2015-08-18
Packaged: 2018-04-15 07:45:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4598577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fracturedvaels/pseuds/fracturedvaels
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carver, the night before Hawke comes back from the Deep Roads.</p>
            </blockquote>





	if you ever come back

Carver crawls into their bed and curls up. Mother and Gamlen are asleep, now; he’s been doing this for weeks, surely he shouldn’t still be doing this.

He misses them. Maker, he misses them; he runs his fingers over the pillow, touches the bedsheets, turns and presses his face to cold fabric. It’s the icy breath of a dead thing.

How often has he cried into this stupid pillow? The first time was too much, when he woke up the day of promised return to… nothing. He kept hoping, waiting, thinking each day he just got it wrong. “Today,” he told himself, clutching a blanket between his aching fingers. “Today, you’ll come back. Right?”

But too many _today_ ’s had come and gone. Too many times he’d sworn he’d wake up to them laughing and complaining about collapsed tunnels or something. He watched their funds dwindle and his mother grow colder. She always gave him this look and while his rational mind said she was worried, that part of himself that was louder, that hated him more than anyone else did - it told him she was thinking, _‘why couldn’t it be you instead?’_

Carver was a Hawke, but he wasn’t _Hawke._ He knew what he had to do, and he’d done it feeling like he was swallowing flies, signing a contract that may as well have been with a Tevinter slaver. Templars, in Carver’s mind, we no better than the bastards chasing Fenris down.

“I joined the Templars,” he said now, tentatively, afraid. “I - I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to do. No one else will have me. I… I thought of the Rose, even. But I can’t do that again.”

His voice got weaker with each word. He begged that pillow to be different, to be collar bones and a neck; he willed the blankets to arms, the rustling of the sheets to be soothing whispers. He wanted to be small again - the child everyone kept treating him like, for someone to hold him and tell him he was doing the right thing. He wanted so badly to do the right thing, to not be the mistake. He wanted that just once. Just once.

**Author's Note:**

> premium carver hawke content all the time at http://liviuserimond.tumblr.com/


End file.
